Fiction Advocate

By Stacie Williams

Literary Nonfiction. As a black woman and a comics geek, Stacie Williams identified strongly with one aspect of The Fortress of Solitude—its portrayal of gentrification. For Jonathan Lethem's characters, and for Williams in her own life, gentrificat...

Fiction Advocate

By Stephanie Reents

Literary Nonfiction. After teaching Cormac McCarthy's bloodiest, most challenging novel to her students for years, Stephanie Reents feels no closer to the strange void at the heart of Blood Meridian than when she began. So she journeys west, followi...

Fiction Advocate

By Adam Colman

Literary Nonfiction. A brave new mode of literature has been emerging in the work of Sheila Heti, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and others. Call it what you will; Adam Colman calls it essayistic fiction. In this sharp, playful book, Colman dives deep into Be...

Fiction Advocate

By Nina Schuyler

Literary Nonfiction. Writing. Composition. You've got a great story, but do you have great sentences? Stylish sentences have their own powerful energy that mesmerizes and even rearranges a reader's world. Think of this book as a private lesson with ...

Fiction Advocate

By Jacob Bacharach

Literary Nonfiction. Essay. Reading Joan Didion's iconic memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, Jacob Bacharach's thoughts are never far from his brother, Nate, who died of an opioid addiction. Although he tries to be a "a cool customer" like Didion, ...

Fiction Advocate

By Genevieve Hudson

Literary Nonfiction. Growing up queer in the deep South, Genevieve Hudson longed for stories about lives like her own. So she turned to Alison Bechdel's groundbreaking graphic memoir, FUN HOME. In its panels, she found sly references to Bechdel's pe...

Fiction Advocate

By Jonathan Russell Clark

Literary Nonfiction. After Devouring 2666 by Roberto Bolaño on the New York City subway, Jonathan Russell Clark does what any good literary critic would do—he reads everything by Bolaño he can get his hands on. But the more he learns about the write...

Fiction Advocate

By Matthew Gallaway

Fiction. A radical new myth about sex, faith, and those of us who will never dieA young boy wanders into the woods of Harlem and witnesses the abduction of his sister by a glowing creature. Forty years later, now working as a New York City homicide ...

Fiction Advocate

By Frank Reddy

Fiction. Not long ago, Will Fordham was a charismatic young preacher on the rise. But a family trip to the beach cost him everything. Will was struck by an unexpected seizure while wading in the ocean, drowning his young son. In the aftermath of the...

Fiction Advocate

By Vladimir Kozlov

Fiction. It's hard to be sentimental about a Cold War Childhood if you grew up on the Soviet side, in the forgotten Belorussian Republic, in a crumbling industrial city like Mogilev. But it's even harder when your friends kick your ass and piss on y...

Fiction Advocate

By J M Geever

Fiction. California Interest. Myra Scar lies murdered on the floor of her gourmet restaurant, stabbed in the back with one eye cut out. The Chief of Police of Paso Robles will not find her killer by interrogating Patton August, the deceitful slacker...